A bounce-rate attack to manipulate SEO ?
- by Denis Volovik
This is a question to experienced people that might help us shed some light on the issue.
We noticed a very strange behavior on our site, in Google Analytics.
Some dude from Finland, namely, from Kouvola city is hitting one of our pages - only one page on our site, 'bout a hundred times per day, all with an average bounce rate of 90%+...
This is causing our overall bounce rate to go up by 1 to 3% per day... which is very disturbing.. since we're trying to do our best in order to keep it as low as possible.
And obviously having it jumped from ~24% to 27%, just because of that crazy dude is not making us happy at all... We tried implementing a geo-targeted script in order to catch this particular visitor and deliver him a juicy message, and it seemed like it helped in the beginning, it has stopped for a day or two, but now he's back...
The geo-targeted script was also logging all IP addresses for page requests originating from Finland in order to find out more details and (in order to block them on the server level, later).. but thing is, it was all mainly cable or DSL connections with various, but not constantly repeating IPs... we are all wondering what is he up to really ?
I think that this page should be kept updated with ideas on how to combat this and perhaps someone could also shed light on what it might be ? What is the reason for doing this "bounce-rate attack", as I call it?
There was a similar question asked on stackoverflow earlier, with no meaningful answer - here - How to stop bounce rate manipulation.
